Surviving funks is like surviving a long, heady night out with the boys: isolate yourself, innudate yourself with water/piss/panadol and then brood as the headaches take over. It’s such a human endeavour, getting stuck with ruts and such; it’s almost as if we are pre-programmed to stumble through life with one eye blind and the other shuttered. I suppose stumbling has its very own, particular comic value to watching deities. (anyone remember Gabriel’s opinion of angels on the expression of faces during coitus? ha!)
And sometimes you see it coming, the train-wreck to end all train-wrecks, and most times you don’t. I didn’t and my own particularly cheerful train-wreck has been creeping up on me without my knowledge. How has this come to pass, one might ask? It’s pretty simple: backroom deals, conversations whispered between conspirators in private and other cloak-and-dagger stuff resulting, with reference to the latter, with daggers in the back.
“Et tu, Brute?”
Et tu, indeed. I suppose there’s a reason that none of us can touch the smalls of our backs. There’s always a blind spot behind; try it with one arm and you only go so far. With the other arm and you fall just short. With both hands and you’ll be flailing (or look like a bleached-blonde, bosomy model thrusting her assets in everyone’s faces).
That’s just why the expression “daggers in the back” just works so well: you don’t see the dagger coming, you don’t see it, and when it strikes, you flail about like a failed porn-star trying to rid yourself of an offending, artificial appendage.
The particularities of my happy situation notwithstanding, there are just so many ways to intellectualize betrayal: in Kundera’s Immortality, it is described as a sudden intoxicating freedom, a sudden euphoric realization, a freedom in leaving your attachments, intoxicated with the thought that you might be able to “find yourself” anew in other pastures. But really, who paints such breath-taking pictures of their own betrayals — or their own feelings of being betrayed?
No one I know; if your girlfriend screws someone else, you want to smash your fist in the offending other party’s face, not wax anti-lyrical about authenticity and such. No, no, I’ve not had the misfortune of suffering such heart-rending betrayals. (not yet!)
My reaction to a friend’s betrayal was somewhat more bizarre, actually. Before the inevitable bout of depression hit me, I felt strangely happy; not happy happy, mind, just light-headed. Light-headed, because it was just so bizarre; that he would do it was just that bizarre: bizarre and strange. I grinned maniacally whilst reading Lim Kit Siang blog about rattling the zoo-cages of parliament, grinned maniacally while listening to Marcy Playground declare that they love “sex and candy”. Fuckin’-A, that’s what I say.
And when I came to my senses and stopped doing my favourite Joker clown-act, I became thoughtful, then angry, then resigned. Just resigned to absurdity.
